temper, never at its best on a morning of cubbing, was making exhaustive demands on his stock of expletives.  Rabbits were flying about in every direction, each with a shrieking puppy or two in its wake.  Jerry, the Whip, was galloping ventre a terre along the road in the vain endeavour to overtake a couple in headlong flight to the farm where they had spent their happier earlier days.  At the other side of the wood the Master was blowing himself into apoplexy in the attempt to recall half a dozen who were away in full cry after a cur-dog, and a zealous member of the hunt looked as if he were playing polo with another puppy that doubled and dodged to evade the lash and the duty of getting to covert.  Hither and thither among the beech trees went that selection from the Master’s family circle, exclusive of the furtive Nora, that had on this occasion taken the field.  It was a tradition in the country that there were never fewer than four Miss Purcells out, and that no individual Miss Purcell had more than three days’ hunting in the season.  Whatever may have been the truth of this, the companion legend that each Miss Purcell slept with two hound puppies in her bed was plausibly upheld by the devotion with which the latter clung to the heels of their nurses.

In the midst of these scenes of disorder an old fox rightly judging that this was no place for him, slid out of the covert, and crossed the road just in front of where Nora, in a blue serge skirt and a red Tam-o’-Shanter cap, lurked on the foxy mare.  Close after him came four or five couple of old hounds, and, prominent among her elders, yelped the puppy that had been Nora’s special charge.  This was not cubbing, and no one knew it better than Nora; but the sight of Carnage among the prophets—­Carnage, whose noblest quarry hitherto had been the Mount Purcell turkey-cock—­overthrew her scruples.  The foxy mare, a ponderous creature, with a mane like a Nubian lion and a mouth like steel, required nearly as much room to turn in as a man-of-war, and while Nora, by vigorous use of her heel and a reliable ash plant, was getting her head round, her sister Muriel, on a raw-boned well-bred colt—­Sir Thomas, as he said, made the best of a bad job, and utilised his daughters as roughriders—­shot past her down the leafy road, closely followed by a stranger on a weedy bay horse, which Nora instantly recognised as the solitary hireling of the; neighbourhood.

Through the belt of wood and out into the open country went the five couple, and after them went Muriel, Nora and the strange man.  There had been an instant when the colt had thought that it seemed a pity to leave the road, but, none the less, he had the next instant found himself in the air, a considerable distance above a low stone wall, with a tingling streak across his ribs, and a bewildering sensation of having been hustled.  The field in which he alighted was a sloping one and he ramped down it very enjoyably to himself, with all the weight of his sixteen hands